In recent years, there has been a trend towards the use of an exercise equipment to increase muscle and body mass, whether it is at a gym or at home. Although more and more people seek better weight exercise equipments and gym machines for use at home, office or fitness club, current gym exercise equipments available in the market hardly satisfy people's needs because in many instances the equipments are cumbersome, heavy to be moved around and occupy a large space. In addition, many gym exercise machines have limited functions due to the fact that they can only exercise one or few parts of the body. For instance, an abdominal exercise bench or a weight-lifting equipment provides only one kind of exercise function. To exercise different parts of muscle or body, a user has to use various kinds of gym exercise machines or exercise equipments. This not only increases the time and cost of exercise but also requires a significant amount of space for setting up various gym exercise equipments. It also causes inconvenience to users.
Most, if not all, gym exercise machines work by having human body muscle part against weights or tensions provided by an object during the exercise of that particular part of muscle. For example, many gym exercise devices use free weights or other heavy weights to provide resistance during an exercise regime. This type of gym exercise machines usually requires a much larger and heavier machine frame to support heavy weights such as metal bricks, which are cumbersome, difficult to use, and heavy to be moved from one location to another. Unpleasant noise is produced when a heavy weight metal brick falls on one below it as it is being operated.
Some exercise devices attempt to overcome the shortcomings posed by the use of heavy weights in providing resistance to an exercise user. Some exercise devices use bows to replace heavy weights, for example, Bowflex type of gym exercise machine. The bows bend and create a resistance when they are being pulled from one end of a gym exercise machine. By selecting the number of bows to be used, a user can vary the level of the resistance or tensions. The bow-based gym exercise machine is lighter than the heavy-weights-based gym exercise machine. It, however, occupies a large space when the bows of the exercise machine are pulled open. Besides, the bow-based gym exercise machine may cause harm to the people near it when the bows are bent from a close to an open position, or are retracted from an open to a close position.
Therefore, a heretofore unaddressed need exists in the art to address the aforementioned deficiencies and inadequacies, especially in connection with the making of multi-purpose fitness apparatuses.